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The Aptana IDE for Ajax Development

Aptana is an IDE for HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding based on Eclipse.
I reviewed Aptana using Fedora Core 6 on a modern dual-core machine
with 2GB of RAM. Installing Aptana can be a little difficult with
Fedora Core 6 and may be so for other modern Linux distributions as
well.

Initially, I attempted the install with the “zip (no installer)”
download, which is about 43MB without the Java runtime. I extracted the zip
file and ran the Aptana script with the Sun JDK 1.5.0 and 1.6.0, but in
both cases, the IDE refused to start.

So, I changed to the “BIN Plus Java Runtime 1.4.2” download,
which is 74MB, and the
Aptana_IDE_Setup.bin file refused to execute with a libc.so.6
error. After searching the forums, I found that you can resolve this issue
with a little use of sed (see Resources). Once the graphical installer was
complete, Aptana still refused to start with an “XPCOM error
-2147467262”.

The fix for the XPCOM issue is to install Mozilla and export
MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME to Mozilla's base path. Unfortunately, Mozilla is no
longer in Fedora Linux. I found that with the BIN plus runtime
installation, after a short period of time, the JVM would SEGV with
“Too
many open files”.

A much better method is to install Eclipse from your
distribution's repository and then install the Aptana
plugin.

The IDE offers syntax highlighting, code completion, file navigation
through document structure (going to parts of the DOM or JavaScript
functions by name), breakpoint debugging of code running in Firefox and
some synchronization options.

Syntax highlighting is context-sensitive and works quite nicely across
mixed HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript content. Code completion didn't
work on the little PHP I played with, but it worked quite well for
JavaScript—the one exception was when I created a variable for a
new instance of XMLHttpRequest, the method name code completion
didn't initially work for that variable. This seemed to sort itself
out though. Code completion on the browser DOM also shows the browser
and version of it in which that feature is supported. According to an August 2006 Web interview
with Paul Colton, founder of Aptana, the ability to
set requirements for a set of browsers and versions and have the IDE
flag methods outside these requirements as errors is a planned
feature.

Figure 1. Aptana performing code assist for the send() method of an
XMLHttpRequest. Methods for the object are shown, and for the current
candidate method, the arguments and minimal browser requirements are
shown as extra assistance.
The outline view on the far right allows quick navigation through HTML,
CSS and JavaScript mixed content. In the middle right is a preview of the
current HTML page being edited in the middle left.

Aptana allows you to create a new JavaScript project and select from a
bunch of third-party libraries, including
Aflax, Dojo, MochiKit, Mootools, Prototype, Rico, Scriptaculous, Yahoo
UI, jQuery and yui-ext.

For HTML files, you can have a browser either in another tab or
horizontally/vertically next to the file you are editing. This browser
is reloaded automatically when you save the HTML. This makes a hack-and-see session for some JavaScript fairly quick.

Selecting debug from the IDE caused Firefox to run and installed the extension
so that Aptana could talk to Firefox. With this combination, you can
set breakpoints in Aptana, run debug from the IDE (which loads the page
into Firefox), and when a breakpoint is hit in Firefox, Aptana
springs to the front at that breakpoint. The integration of the IDE
with Firefox works well; however, a few times when Aptana
became slow, I had to restart Eclipse to recover. This may be
a result of my configuration and not Aptana, although I was
running Fedora Eclipse with only the Aptana plugin and a bare-bones
Firefox setup.

As far as Ajax support, an Ajax Monitor is available that shows
the requests and responses issued. Unfortunately, the preview for an
HTML file you are editing most surely will bomb out with a permission-denied error if you attempt Ajax with XMLHttpRequest from it. If you
use the debug mode in Aptana to start an external instance of Firefox,
XMLHttpRequest likely will not work as well. The Firefox instance that Aptana
starts will load a URL, such as http://127.0.0.1:8001/foo.htm, which is
served by a Web server that Aptana includes. Assume there is an
XMLHttpRequest for a simple path, such as /cgi-bin/foo.pl, to make sure
you request from the originating server and avoid the permission-denied
error from the browser. Then, the browser will ask the Web server
running in Aptana on port 8001 for this resource and fail. It would be
nice if you could configure the Aptana Web server to proxy some
requests to a server and return the result back to the Firefox instance you are
using for debugging. If, for example, you change the URL in the Firefox
instance that Aptana started for debugging to a version of the site served
by Apache, such as http://localhost/foo/myapp.html, your Ajax
requests might function properly, but Aptana breakpoints no longer
will work.

It would be nice to be able to set up breakpoints in the Ajax Monitor,
so the JavaScript onreadystatechange callback would be
halted—for example, if an XPath2 matched against the response of a
request. You can work around this by setting a suitably verbose
expression breakpoint in the JavaScript function, but it would be better
if it were integrated more directly into the Ajax Monitor itself.

The IDE includes support for synchronizing files with FTP or SFTP
servers, but rsync support is currently missing.

The Aptana screen casts page is a good resource for quickly seeing
Aptana's features and how to use them; however, some of the
presentations may be less useful for people who are familiar with IDEs in
general.

This review has highlighted some short-comings (particularly
to do with XMLHttpRequest and debugging stability) and a few bugs here and
there. But, overall, Aptana is a very nice IDE for hacking some HTML, CSS,
JavaScript and possibly PHP code.

Summary

The Debatable:

The use of Eclipse can be a polarizing factor.

The Good:

The syntax highlighting and completion works well across HTML, CSS and
JavaScript mixed content.

Setting breakpoints and stepping around JavaScript code running in a
Firefox browser launched from Aptana.

The Bad:

Using Aptana breakpoint debugging with Ajax XMLHttpRequest calls is not
simple.

Ben Martin has been working on filesystems for more than ten years. He is
currently working toward a PhD on combining Semantic Filesystems with
Formal Concept Analysis to improve human-filesystem interaction.